Here is a reading report by Amber diPietra:
“Friends half-medium and medium-half”, I was so excited to go to the San Francisco/CCA performance of Kindergarde. I’ve been trying to write a series of poems about little kids I have tutored over the last few years. Not about them per se, but about our work together, which often requires us to stare into the absurd worlds-propositions that are their standardized test practice booklets. In which we must circle ‘fact’ or ‘opinion’, or a. or b. In which I must pretend that this is not abysmal and they must pretend they are trying, but really they are distracting me with stories about the moon and I am saying yes and then?
I brought stickers and markers and paper to the event so as to beguile some children in the audience and thus get them to collaborate with me on this reading report.
Kindergarde’s actors included Cyril Jamal Cooper, Mandy Khoshnevisan, Caleb Haven Draper, Norman Muñoz, Juliet Heller, Shaye Troha. It was produced by Dana Teen Lomax, directed by Chris Smith and set/costume design was done by Patrick Maloney.
Play and playlets included: “December 16, 2006” by Robin Blaser, The Carpet Square by Sarah Ann Cox, Throat Bird by Camille Roy, “Apricot Madness” by Rosmarie Waldrop, The Night I Walked Into The Jungle by Bhanu Kapil, “Sunday Song” by Noelle Kocot, The Word Play by Douglas Kearney, Streetnamer on the Moon by Susan Gevirtz, Avant-Garde Exrercises by Juliana Spahr, “The Name of Things” by Edwin Torres, Young Willie Wonka by Brent Cunningham, The Jesus Donut by Jaime Corez, “All the Tea in China” by Charles Bernstein, Nakaloo by Juan Felipe Herrera, “8 December, 2006” Robin Blaser.
Things that there were:
a candy robot and “every time you licked it, you would go 2 seconds into the future”.
a sno-cone machine, a very level-headed one that would disturb no one with its delicious rocket because you could “throw a hundred clouds over it to make it quieter.”
an Olga who made the kids in on her street take communion with the glazed donut she bought. “That [donut] drawer was so beautiful, nobody said nothing.”
a galactic boulevard lullaby in which we touched the belly of cat to name streets on the moon. “Familiar as the sound of water out of the faucet calling your name” and “your car on rails sliding through the car wash.” (Upon which I was thinking of me, being 2 years old in a car seat and my mother, at the gas station, letting me stay in the car while it got conveyored through the wash-o-matic and she stood outside, waving. Her face eclipsed by a tsunami of water over the wind shield and the my apple juice flying threw the air, sticky cool and sweet on my face and hands.
also, a girl that lived in a hip hop shoe, a trombonist (Andy Strain) to punctuate with waahmp waahmp and lend a shiny brassy air to the theatrics.
“Precision is not thinking of the future.” said the 9 year old who went into the jungle, said me to myself and took maybe too few notes on so many good lines as I was busy watching the kids in the audience. And so, precision has no written record, which is pure poetry everyone.
At the very end, there came the words “Kiss my ass” in a Robin Blaser poem, I think an edict to anyone who make floating unflotatious. I saw a boy in front of me lunge toward the man next to him and whisper, grinning and scandalized.
Intermission meant a kind of snowstorm of crushed popcorn all around the carpeted area outside somersaults and kids practicing splits.
Here are my three Kindergarde collaborations:
Talk with Savia during intermission.
S: Why are your hands so small?
A: because I am a small person.
This logic doesn’t please her. I offer my hand so we can compare sizing.
S: Can you move them like I this?
Then, we play spider-on-the-mirror.
S: Well, how old are you anyway?
A: Guess.
S: Six
A: No. How high can you count?
S; 21.
A: I am 10 more than that.
S: Well then, I guess you are not very small for that age.
Nascha and her art—between viewings of Kindergarde at the Museum of Children’s Art and at SPT.
And, an e-collaboration with Thelonious Arjun Rider: How to look at an organ fortress after walking into the jungle.
NOTES ON SQUINTING* (per an email from Bhanu Kapil.)
M-O-M!!!! [Each letter said aloud]. I need glitter! More glitter! Okay, so this is the tower and here are the underground tunnels and this is either the eye or the window. It's the eye. I need red glitter. And, okay, now come down here. And squint. What happens when you squint? Something happens to the glitter. The silver glitter does something and the red glitter goes kind of black. And this is the sea where you swim in to the underground tunnels. And these are the caves [starting jabbing the slab of red clay with a paintbrush] where the skeleton dragons and the sea horses and the regular dragons live. Can you see them? I need more glitter. And macaroni and cheese. Mom, I'm hungry.
*Whilst building with red clay, sea glass, glitter and turquoise paper on the floor of the living room in Colorado , on a Saturday morning. Thelonious, age 9, verbatim.
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